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Last week I attended the opening reception for Project Los Altos – a multi-site exhibition in which seven artists, myself included, were commissioned by SFMoMA to make new work. Group shows of commissioned work can be hit or miss affairs, but I found Project Los Altos to be an unusually strong offering.

One of the most compelling things about the exhibition is that it doesn’t have a fixed location. During my visit I walked around town and saw work in storefronts, street corners and orchards. It feet like a treasure hunt. In order to see Mike Mills’s installation, I had to walk past the counter of an old costume shop to a storeroom in back. Even without Mills’s thoughtful installation, the shop itself was worth the trip.

One of the things Mills presented was a facsimile printing of a locally owned weekly paper, The Los Altos Town Crier, from April 7, 1976 ­– the same week that Apple was founded out of Steve Jobs’s garage in Los Altos.

While I expected the newspaper to be a shockingly dated look at social media before the advent of the personal computer, it didn’t differ all that much from current community papers. Here are some of the headlines:

Residential burglaries show 58% increase

Local groups to paint bicentennial fireplugs

Housing committee to urge aid for elderly

Couple teaches class for mature travelers

Nurse, MV policeman to pledge wedding vows

Eagles whip Spartans, 7-1

Weekly community newspapers like the Los Altos Crier inspired the work Brad Zellar and I do with The LBM Dispatch. While on our various rambles working on the Dispatch, it always comes as a bit of surprise that community life carries on. As cynical as we might become about the various social and environmental affects of our current age, people still gather in community centers, fireplugs are still painted. Looking at this issue of the Los Altos Crier, life doesn’t seem that much better or worse than it was thirty-three years ago.

But what about the future? As part of his installation, Mills made a fantastic video in which he interviewed children whose parents work in the tech industry. He asked 8 to 12 year-olds for their predictions about the future. “It’s kind of dark,” says Mills of their responses, “so many of the kids think that in the future there’s not going to be nature, there’s not going to be animals, people are going to be not as smart as they are now.“

The video is both funny and saddening. But I wonder if the children’s cynicism is unique to our age? In the 1976 Crier, I read the following:

Everyone seems to have an opinion – and usually a strong one – about whether or not our High School District should reduce its graduation requirement for English from the present three years to two.

Not long ago the requirement was for four years of English.

If the change is made, students would supplement their two years of English with two years of “communications” courses, which could include English, or such subjects as computer programming or a foreign language.

Times are changing. Maybe the fact that many of today’s kids are weak on writing skills is telling us something – possibly something slightly frightening – about the future.

The future is always frightening. There’s always a new, scary technology changing us. But as I stood in the affectionately tattered Costume Bank in Los Altos with a handful of strangers, I felt encouraged. With a little bit of effort, we can still find authentic and meaningful communal experiences.

The three or four people who follow these Popsicle posts might have noticed the lack of writing about music. The embarrassing truth is that I just don’t give it much attention. When I was young, I was a passionate record collector. I loved studying the album’s lyrics and artwork alone in my bedroom, but I lost interest when CD’s came along.

Live music has never played a big part of my life. I guess I was too much of a loner and felt self-conscious about waving a lighter all by myself. So for twenty years, music has mostly been background noise. But every now and then something causes me to prick up my ears.

Last week a random magazine assignment had me photographing a legendary underground musician who performs under a pseudonym. I took the assignment because I was intrigued by the mystique. But when I saw him perform, I was underwhelmed. The music only seemed to exist in service of propping up the fabricated persona.

The next morning while driving to work I turned on our local public radio music station, The Current. Despite being public radio, The Current mostly features a rotation of not-Top-40 but still widely circulated contemporary pop music. But on this morning they were featuring a ‘theft of the dial’ segment in which a musician takes over the DJ duties and so the rotation was disrupted.

In this case the DJ was another singer who works under a pseudonym, Father John Misty, aka Josh Tillman. I’m not sure what to think of Tillman, but I will give him credit for introducing me (and the rest of the drive-time audience) to an incredible piece of music:

When this came on the radio, I was immediately carried away into the universe of the song. What a relief, I realized later, that none of this had to do with persona. I didn’t know that Hurley, aka Dr. Snock, recorded this at age 22, a few days after being released from the psychiatric wing of Bellevue Hospital. Nor did I know that it was recorded on the same reel-to-reel machine that taped Lead Belly’s Last Sessions.

“If Michael Hurley were just a little crazier, he’d be huge,” wrote the LA Weekly, “If he wore a funny hat like Sun Ra and was obsessed with, say, lawnmowers or parakeets, maybe more people would pay attention.”

After hearing “The Tea Song,” I realized that I should pay more attention. – not just to Hurley, but to music generally. I might just go out and buy the record.

The purpose of these weekly blog assignments is to raise the bar of my cultural consumption. When I was in my twenties, I listened to John Zorn and read John Ashbery. But I got lazy after drinking the midlife cocktail of career and kids. I might have a dozen foreign documentaries in my Nexflix cue, but when the kids finally get to sleep, all I want is to do is take a bath in Breaking Bad.

I thought a lot about the different roles that culture plays in one’s lifetime while watching Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film, Stalker, and reading Geoff Dyer’s recent book-length homage to the film, Zona. Dyer first saw Stalker in his twenties and it has haunted him ever since.  Midway through the book, Dyer discusses the role of age in his response to the film:

The prominent place occupied in my consciousness by Stalker is almost certainly bound up with the fact that I saw it at a particular time in my life. I suspect it is rare for anyone to see their – what they consider to be the – greatest film after the age of thirty. After forty it’s extremely unlikely. After fifty, impossible.

The most important film in my life was Kings of the Road (Im Lauf der Zeit) by Wim Wenders. Like Stalker, it is a late-70’s art house film that challenges viewers with a slow pace and nearly three-hour running time. In the case of both films, the way this time is experienced is largely what makes it potentially life-altering. But excluding the benefits of a good nap, can one’s life be altered significantly by a film after the age of forty?

It turns out I was thoroughly engaged by Stalker. Like Kings of the Road, it is something of a road movie. Three men take a forbidden journey into “the zone” in search for “the room” where all of one’s wishes are realized. While there isn’t much of a story, there is suspense. Will they safely find the room? What will happen when they get there?

What I enjoyed most about Stalker was the amount of time I had to consider these questions (and many others) during the course of the film. A traditional thriller is often described as a roller coaster ride. In Stalker, the peaks and valleys have been flattened and the viewer has time to look out at the landscape and consider the meaning of the journey. This is literally the case in a railroad scene that Dyer names “one of the great sequences in the history of cinema.”

While putting this post together, I looked up the YouTube clip of this scene. It is fascinating to see how utterly stripped of meaning it is when viewed as a three-minute excerpt on the web. “Stalker is a literal journey that is also a journey into cinematic space and – in tandem – into time,” writes Dyer. So to experience this scene outside of that space is to not experience it at all. I’m reminded of the way I watched The Tree of Life on an airplane monitor over the course of two transatlantic flights.

Here is a quote by Tarkovsky and Dyer’s response:

‘If the regular length of a shot is increased, one becomes bored, but if you keep on making it longer, it piques your interest, and if you make it even longer, a new quality emerges, a special intensity of attention.’ This is Tarkovsky’s aesthetic in a nutshell. At first there is a friction between our experience of time and Tarkovsky-time and this friction is increasing in the twenty-first century as we move further and further away from Tarkovsky-time towards moron-time in which nothing can last – and no one can concentrate on anything – for longer than about two seconds.

The great pleasure of watching Stalker was to finally have an escape from moron-time. But was my life changed? Can such a thing even happen to someone in his forties? The more I think about Stalker, the more this seems to be the very subject of the film. The three characters in Stalker are all middle-aged and world-weary. All are coming to the Zone in hopes of changing the course of their lives. At the end of the jouney/film, all three men return to the bar where they started. While they have all experienced something monumental, none appears fundamentally changed. Only the one child in the film seems capable of channeling the room’s magical forces.

I loved Stalker. But it couldn’t quite take me to the same transformative place that Kings of the Road did. Perhaps that kind of epic transformation is reserved for the young.

A recent study suggests that “Facebook envy” affects one in three users of the site.  Family happiness was noted as a particular source of grief and vacation photos the greatest cause of resentment.

I confess I felt similar pangs of envy while reading Tamara Shopsin’s memoir, MUMBAI  NEW YORK  SCRANTON. The book starts with Shopsin and her husband vacationing in India. It didn’t help that I read about their travels while on my own family vacation to Wisconsin Dells. While Shopsin and her husband visit neglected museums and hunt for arcane mementos, I was staying at Kalahari – the 2^nd largest indoor waterpark resort in the country – with several thousand other miserable Midwestern families.

Nor did it help that Shopsin’s husband is Jason Fulford. Not only is Fulford one of my favorite photographers and publishers, he appears to be an unusually sweet husband. He calls Shopsin “beach ball,” sends her postcards while they are traveling together, and comforts her by resting his chin on her eye.

Like the most lyrical status updates you’ve ever seen, the couple’s photographs and illustrations sprinkled throughout the book are only more cause for envy. But even without the artwork, Shopsin and Fulford are able to make a trip to the grocery store charmingly romantic:

Jason pushes the cart. He calls it a “buggy.” This and calling any kind of soda “Coke” are all that’s left of his Southern accent

People study meditation for twenty years to clear their minds of worry and distraction. Jason and I go to Wegman’s.

The first stop is always produce. Jason gets the standards. Green beans, Fuji apples, baby carrots and so on. I find the curve-balls like fennel or beets. The fish department has misters in the cases. We hold hands and pick out a salmon fillet because it has omega-3. I remember we need peanut butter and am rewarded with a kiss. The ritual takes an hour, costs $125, and will feed us for a week.

Not only did reading this make me envious (why don’t I grocery shop with my wife, much less while holding her hand?), I felt guilty for feeling envious (why can’t I be more self-assured like Tamara and Jason?).

After drowning my self-pity in Amstel Light on the fake beach of Kalahari, I read on. It actually takes a long time for Shopsin to get to the “harrowing adventure” described on the book’s dust jacket. On his Facebook page, Shopsin’s friend John Hodgeman describes it this way:

There is a THING THAT HAPPENS in this book, and I knew what it was, and what a devastating surprise it was, and what happened after…

And when I finally did reach the moment where THE THING THAT HAPPENS started to happen, I audibly gasped in surprise, which I never usually do. I realized suddenly that every sentence led to this inevitable thing, and hinted at it, and I should have known all along.

I too was surprised by THE THING THAT HAPPENS. And it was fascinating to see the way it shaped my understanding of everything that preceded it. Suddenly, the stroll through the supermarket made sense. Shopsin was seeing the scene with the precision of an artist and the gratitude of a survivor. My envy vanished.

The morning after finishing MUMBAI  NEW YORK  SCRANTON, I discovered the omelet bar at the Kalahari’s breakfast buffet. I loaded up my bowl with onions, mushrooms and jalapeno peppers. When the omelet was done, I smothered it in Tabasco and Sriracha. I sat next to my wife and enjoyed every bite.  I even considered posting a picture on Facebook.